Mark As Completed Discussion

So first-- we can quickly implement a queue using a list or array in most languages! This is intuitive given that they're both linear data structures, and we just need to enforce some constraints on data flow:

  1. To enqueue an item in the queue, we can use the list function append.
  2. To dequeue an item from the queue, we can use the list function pop(0).
  3. If we want the "top-most" (or last element to be processed) item in the queue, we can get the last index of the list using the [-1] index operator.

This is by far the easiest approach, but not necessarily the most performant.

1// Initialize a queue list
2queue = [];
3
4// Add elements
5queue.push(1);
6queue.push(2);
7queue.push(3);
8
9console.log("Initial queue state:");
10console.log(queue);
11
12// Removing elements from the queue
13console.log("Elements dequeued from queue");
14console.log(queue.pop());
15console.log(queue.pop());
16console.log(queue.pop());
17
18console.log("Queue after removing elements");
19console.log(queue);

Note that in C++, I used the standard queue container, which doesn't allow for direct access to its elements. The initial printout of the queue state is achieved by copying the queue to a temporary one and iterating through it. In the Go version, I used slices, which provide direct access to the underlying array, making it easier to print the entire queue.

To make this more efficient with lists, we can create a fixed-sized list and use it with two pointers and modular operations. It will yield a queue with O(1) access and deletion time.

1function Queue() {
2  this.items = [];
3}
4
5Queue.prototype.enqueue = function (val) {
6  this.items.push(val);
7};
8
9Queue.prototype.dequeue = function () {
10  return this.items.shift();
11};
12
13// Check if the queue is empty
14Queue.prototype.isEmpty = function () {
15  return this.items.length == 0;
16};
17
18// Get the element at the front of the queue
19Queue.prototype.peek = function () {
20  return !this.isEmpty() ? this.items[0] : undefined;
21};
22
23Queue.prototype.length = function () {
24  return this.items.length;
25};
26
27let q = new Queue();
28console.log(q);